Many of your were following along on Twitter while this unfolded -- here's the expanded version ....

Yesterday we had a pair of tickets to the final dress rehearsal of the Philadelphia Opera Company's production of Verdi's Otello but trillian_stars had rehearsal herself for the Iliad which opens October 1, so I went with my friend Colin.

The show was lovely, Mark Delavan, who played Iago had injured his knee earlier and performed the whole thing in a wheelchair & this blog post probably would have been about the show were it not for The Weird Thing That Happened After.

We went out to one of my favorite bars, XIX, high atop the Bellvue hotel in Center City and sat down at a table. Right next to us, about a foot and a half away was another table where a non descript 40something couple were having drinks. Colin asked something about the reception on my iPhone and I said I'd never been able to get the signal strength to go down with the "death grip", so I pulled the case off of it and we tried to make the signal go down by holding it in various ways -- we were engaged in this scientific endeavor while waiting for our drinks when the woman next to us said:

"You have Hello Kitty on your phone," she said, turning it over in her hand.

"When there are five iPhones on the table," I replied, "I never pick up the wrong one." I have this conversation so often that at this point it's kind of like a chess opening you've memorized. Her next line is supposed to be "This is so freaking awesome!" but she deviated from the script.

"You've got a @#$%ing problem." She said -- not in the funny way, but in the angry way and things changed a little, like got weird. I could tell that she was really offended by my phone.

She got extremely agitated very quickly and then leaned over to her date and said, "Aren't you going to do something about this?"

At this point trillian_stars arrived and we started talking about the show, but I had one wandering eye watching the action next to us -- the angry woman wouldn't let it go. She goaded her date to "kick [my] ass" and eventually he said "Dorothy, I'm not going to hit someone because you don't like his telephone."

She banged her drink down and grunted "If you can't fight Mr Hello Kittyphone maybe you shouldn't be dating me," and stalked off.

He got up and followed her out and that was that.

Looking back at my Twitter feed, the whole thing from first comment to her boiling over like an unwatched kettle took 32 minutes. It must be very stressful to live like that.

Seems obvious to me that Trillian swept in with her magical powers and that's why the woman took off around the same time.

Seriously ~ I'm glad it didn't escalate, but I'm sorry to hear that a.) that kind of absurd homophobia would ever exist in the first place, and b.) that the guy followed her (unless of course if was just to make sure she didn't endanger anyone else, while seriously figuring out his own exit stage right for the near future).